Monthly Archives: January 2013

The worst columnist in America strikes again. Pay no mind, Mr. Brooks, that your beloved “meritocracy” is fraught with greedy, monomaniacal, ambitious, solipsistic, and amoral swine. Wall Street is filled with these “wunderkind” graduates of elite schools, and yet not many of these überprivileged boys and girls have an ounce of human decency or moral fiber, but instead cheat and steal from their fellow citizens with a gleeful venality and amorality as if it’s their birthright. Meanwhile their poor and working class peers get killed in places like Iraq and Afghanistan while the “elites” cheer on these wars while they themselves are far, far, far from the front lines.

The only acts of “public service” these meritocratic superbrats ever engage in are disingenuous means to pad their college applications and resumes. There are more measures of success in a society than graduating from elite schools, accumulating lofty credentials, and hoarding wealth and privilege. But how would a petty little creep like David Brooks understand this? He’s never served a higher cause in his own privileged life, nor made the kind of self sacrifice and service to others that most of his beloved meritocratic superbrats would mock if ever asked to do it themselves.

Quite a few of my fellow military veteran friends found great success in life by taking a much different path in life than the meritocratic superbrats, and I’d take one of them over a boatload of meritocratic superbrats any day. Maybe part of our moral and ethical problem in America is that real sacrifice and service to others is shared by only a very small fraction of us all, while the rest of the nation pays lip service to it at best, or openly mocks it at worst, and yet we all live within the safe confines of what this service and sacrifice provides us.

We’re quick to call professional athletes heroes, and we genuflect submissively in the direction of celebrities, yet our very survival depends on a very small few among us who mostly eschew any kind of praise or adoration. They do it because it’s right and just, not because it will make them rich and famous. I’m sure most Harvard graduates are good kids, but so are the kids in rifle companies walking point in Fallujah and Tora Bora, or the super brave cops and fireman who risk their lives in service of others, or the inner city school teachers who get paid shit to save our poorest children from a life of illiteracy and alienation. Brooks probably thinks these types are fools for not grasping that platinum ring he finds so alluring.

What a despicable, pompous, utterly useless little clown of a man he is—why does the New York Times employ him to write this piffle?